


Falter

by nerddowell



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: (Ish) - Freeform, Character Study, Gen, Harry's Dead-Posh Upper-Class Upbringing, Kingsman: The Golden Circle - Freeform, it's only Hartwin if you really squint btw, lepidopterist Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-16 06:06:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12336987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerddowell/pseuds/nerddowell
Summary: Harry has always had a fascination with the process of metamorphosis.





	Falter

**Author's Note:**

> My first Kingsman fic but if it's lame please do give me a 'Must try harder!' It never worked at school but who knows, it might motivate me nowadays.

Harry has always had a fascination with the process of metamorphosis; of anything with wings creating, and then escaping, its own prison. There’s a poetic sort of beauty to it, the wriggling, ugly grub wrapping itself up and dissolving itself in its own fluids to emerge in all of nature’s winged splendour. He’d spend hours as a child running around the enormous country estate in Hertfordshire where he grew up, collecting every manner of butterfly he could find in glass jars and emptying them into tanks full of foliage foraged from the gardens, constantly underfoot to everyone with a real job to do – everyone but his parents.

It wasn’t that he was lonely. He wasn’t. He was perfectly happy being an only child, thank you very much; he didn’t much like his older, snobbish cousins who called everyone who wasn’t of their own class ‘plebs’ and took pot-shots at passing cabbage whites with their rifles whenever the estate’s pheasants were in hiding. He revenged himself on them by ‘accidentally’ dropping Mungo’s Shilen DGV in the pond whilst trying to use the butt to fish a jam jar full of tadpoles out of the lake for a school project. He’d gotten a hiding from his father so that his bottom and legs smarted when he pulled his pyjama pants up ready for bed that evening, but watching the moths fluttering around the candle he’d left on the windowsill appeased him.

This obsession didn’t leave him as he grew up, either. Instead, as he was sent from private boarding school to private boarding school, nannied by tired, underpaid Latin American au-pairs during the school holidays, he branched out in his studies from the British specimens fluttering around whatever green spaces he could find to all the butterflies of the world. He escaped from many an enforced brunch with his mother to the National History Museum, where he would stand in front of glass cases of insects, wings pinned open, gazing at the array of colours and shapes in awe. He found a silk moth in his bedroom when he visited his father in Shanghai on a business trip, and could hardly bear to catch it to be mounted.

His collection grew with him; whole shelves full of books on entomology, atlases marked with the locations of past finds along with those he wanted to collect, his bedroom becoming cluttered with cases and cases of fluttering wings.

Now, of course, he’s dead.

In a manner of speaking.

He’s alive, however. He can still feel the soft trembling beat of his heart and hear the exhalation of air from his lungs when he sighs. His hands can trace words on paper – founts of Latin and Greek names, _Bombyx mori_ , _Morpho menelaus_ , _Acherontia atropos_ – as well as images, smooth, delicate lines that form familiar gossamer-thin shapes. He sits in his padded room, staring at the white walls, and writes notes on them for hours, out of memory, wondering when Mother is going to call him back for dinner. There’s a skylight above him so he can see the passage of time, as the sun rolls out of the sky and the moon slinks up after it, trading painted ladies, monarchs and viceroys for cycnias and sphinxes, but he can’t reach up high enough to let them in.

He falls asleep watching them circle the reflection of the moon in the glass, and sometimes they’re joined by all of the moths of his memory, thousands of wings filling the room until he can hear the rustle of paper-thin membranes in the air, feel the breeze against his cheek, and he collapses into sleep with the comforting feeling of being watched over, again like a small child laying in the grass to watch the fireflies at the end of the garden.

He meets a boy – a boy to him, at least – at one point; a boy who first confuses him, with his laden speech about his shoes, and then compares himself to a butterfly, which Harry thinks is the most patently ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. He talks to Harry about being unwanted, unwelcome, and unfortunate; of being the type of insect that’s easily crushed underfoot, because it looks too ugly to live; of owing his entire life as it is now to the confused one-eyed man standing in front of him correcting him on his mixing-up of maggots and caterpillars.

The boy is wonderful. Breathtaking, even. A man now. Eggsy, if he remembers correctly (although his memory is somewhat shaky at the moment). Harry drinks in the green eyes that sparkle every time they find Harry’s, the slightly rough-edged voice (a case for elocution lessons, Mother would say), the well-built body beneath the baggy hoodies and jeans. He can’t imagine anyone so entirely fantastic being anything less than. Harry remembers his own younger years, the insecurities he harboured and secrets he kept beneath a well-tailored uniform, and ignores the sharp feeling in his stomach.

Today is his last day at the facility he’s currently housed in. A couple of staff – his caretakers, he would assume – come in to say goodbye. A bald man with glasses and a warm Scottish accent, accompanied by a black woman with a bob and similar eyewear. An orderly, dressed in white, to hand him new clothes to travel in. The young man.

Eggsy is carrying a puppy, tiny and squirming, in his arms, which he gives to Harry as a goodbye present. Harry takes him, runs his fingers through warm fur, gazes into liquid brown eyes blinking back up at him with all the trust in the world, and when the gun comes out to aim at the dog’s head his first thought is to turn, to place his body between the bullet and the dog. He shouts at Eggsy, scrambling off the bed in desperation to find anywhere to hide the poor creature away, shivering and whining in his arms; Eggsy follows, gun trained on the dog, and Harry panics.

The swarms of butterflies, this time, are not friends. They beat around his head with their wings as if flicking through the pages of the photo album that crashes through his mind – home, his butterflies, Kingsman, Mr. Pickle, Eggsy, Richmond Valentine, the gunshot – the lights waver, too bright in his eyes, the butterflies are still swarming around him, a rough, hoarse voice he doesn’t recognise echoing through the room:

‘A BLANK, IT WAS A FUCKING BLANK–’

Eggsy smiles.

‘You’re not Mr. Pickle,’ Harry says to the dog, staring at it, and the puppy cocks its head.

The butterflies dissipate, melting away into thin air, and Harry blinks to focus on Eggsy’s face, broken into a wide smile, with barely a second to spare before Eggsy throws his arms around him and squeezes as though trying to force what little newly-regained life he has out of his lungs. Harry tries not to let him crush the dog.

The puppy is forgotten as Eggsy buries his head in Harry’s shoulder, trembling a little, and Harry’s own knees feel more than a little weak. Eggsy comes out of his throat before he’s willing to let it, and the young man mumbles something in response and clings harder. It feels as though he’s physically trying to climb inside Harry’s body, to melt through flesh and bone until he’s encompassed, as though Harry is the cocoon Eggsy has wound around himself, and Harry glances down at him.

He remembers watching through the window of the mansion as the recruits ran around the grounds, five clustered in their little group with well-trained dogs at their heels, and looking further down the track to see Eggsy first brandish his gun at JB and then pick him up to stuff him down the front of his bulletproof vest, the pug’s small pressed-in face bobbling in and out of view with Eggsy’s stride. The first training mission, Eggsy thinking of escapes instead of air, yanking on the door before producing the tidal wave of water and bodies into Merlin’s observation centre with a couple of well-aimed punches. The time at Harry’s house in London, mixing martinis and talking about the celebrities’ lives splashed over the front pages whilst theirs remained behind closed doors. Eggsy’s sharp wit and sharper instincts. His grin, cracking his face in half like an egg shell, eyes bright.

Eggsy blossomed under Harry’s careful guidance, even if he does say so himself. He was Harry’s greatest success yet, continuing – and exceeding – where his father left off all those years ago.

Harry pats Eggsy on the back gently and extricates himself from the boy’s grip.

He doesn’t need a cocoon, he thinks. He’s had his wings a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> Did you know there's a shit ton of symbolism around butterflies? They're widely believed to be symbols of (including, but not limited to) the soul, resurrection, endurance, change, hope, and life. It was used as a symbol of conjugal joy and bliss in China, and revered by the Navajo and Hopi. In the Old World, the butterfly was thought to be the spirit of the dead. In Gnostic art, the angel of death is depicted crushing a butterfly underfoot. Its attraction to flame and light symbolise purification by fire. Sailors who saw a butterfly prior to embarkation believed that they would die at sea. In some areas of England, it is thought that butterflies contain the souls of children who have come back to life. Elsewhere in England, a person is supposed to kill the first butterfly they see or face a year of bad luck; if that first butterfly in spring is yellow, sickness is in store for the entire family. Only in Scotland and Ireland does the appearance of a golden butterfly signify something good – it is believed that a golden butterfly near the dead ensures the soul’s place in heaven.
> 
> So... yeah. Cool, Harry.
> 
> Also, the ending is so fucking cliche and I know and I'm sorry.


End file.
